Tag: digital classroom

As the semester winds down at LaGuardia, we took stock during the English department hybrid showcase last week, thinking about our work over the past year. With a mini-grant we received from our Center for Teaching and Learning (previously mentioned here), we’ve been developing our program and our individual classes; what began as a course development plan has morphed into a full-on training/certification program. There are some ongoing questions for consideration that came out of the hybrid mini-grant workshops: both in the interdisciplinary faculty planning meetings with the Center for Teaching and Learning, and on a departmental level. This list includes several other items I’ve been thinking about as well.… Read more

Later today, I will be sharing some of the challenges of discussion forums in a presentation at LaGuardia as part of the Center for Teaching and Learning’s mini-seminar series on Engaging Web 2.0 Resources & Technologies (slides for the talk are at the bottom of this post). Discussion boards are something I have struggled with quite a bit over the years: I only recently came to terms with online discussions, mainly because I found a tool – the chat platform Slack – and a structure that seems to encourage the kind of student-driven conversations I was aiming for.… Read more

Yesterday, a small team of faculty in our department spent four very productive hours, fueled by coffee and mini-Creme Brulee confections from Doughnut Plant, workshopping our hybrid syllabi and assignments for the spring. We applied for and received a generous grant from LaGuardia’s Center for Teaching & Learning to work on our hybrid program this year, and a group of us are working more closely on hybrid course design and further program development.

This is my first time teaching ENG 102: Writing Through Literature – our second-level composition class – as a hybrid. I taught the course around post-apocalyptic lit last year, but I’m overhauling it now both in terms of content (while keeping the post-apocalyptic theme) and design for hybrid delivery.… Read more

For their culminating project, students in my Humanism, Science, and Technology class were asked to create some kind of creative digital media project that touched on our class themes. LIB 200 is the capstone class for Liberal Arts majors at LaGuardia, and our section focused specifically on AI in sci-fi films and TV shows. The students embraced the challenge, and I wanted to take a moment to show off their fabulous work. Working individually or in groups, they first pitched a proposal to the class – getting feedback and crowd-sourcing ideas. Next, they drafted a design plan (which included a research narrative), and then executed the project.… Read more

Students in my Humanism, Science, and Technology capstone class – LIB 200 – generated a survey to gather data and opinions related to topics/discussions that have come up during our meetings (or virtually in our Slack chat forum). As I wrote about a bit earlier, our section is looking at Artificial Intelligence in sci-fi films and tv shows, and considering some of the current debates around AI development. Please fill out this short survey to help us out – thanks!… Read more

I am one of ten faculty fellows participating in an NEH-funded seminar on Technology, Self, and Society at LaGuardia. Today we’ll have the first meeting where we delve into the material – we are responding to Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. While reading Turkle I was also hearing Cathy Davidson’s remarks during our Opening Sessions. I found Davidson’s talk particularly engaging and important, especially as an educator at a community college. In my mind, we should be thinking of ways to use technology and social media to enhance collaborative and democratic practices in our classrooms rather than eschewing it wholesale. … Read more

In my composition class this January/February Fall II term at LaGuardia I’m running the Reacting to the Past game Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor by Mark C. Carnes and Daniel K. Gardner. I plan on posting/writing more about using RTTP in composition and writing intensive classes, as the games work well with my aims when teaching comp and research. Students use primary sources to enter a debate while adopting defined roles, wrestle with the “big ideas” of a particular historical moment, get a sense of individual intellectual/historical agency, and craft argument-driven pieces to influence others. They perform their knowledge of the texts and the politics at play by forming alliances, plotting, and delivering speeches.… Read more

I have seen PowerPoint presentations go horribly wrong (haven’t we all?). Long pieces of text slapped onto a slide, paragraph after paragraph – I’ve witnessed presenters turning their backs on the audience to face the projector screen and read a massive amount of small-font text unceremoniously squeezed onto one slide. Heck, I’ve certainly made slides that have entirely too much text on them for anyone’s good.… Read more